Wednesday, January 19, 2011

"It is a formal letter of defiance," answered the Templar, " but, by our Lady of Bethlehem, if it be not a foolish jest, it is the most extraordinary cartel that ever was sent across the drawbridge of a baronial castle."

Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe, page 20.

The Knights of Malta - I know a couple - are usually Italian/Lithuanian/Irish/Polish/Bohemian or Ukrainian American Funeral directors or construction contractors who make huge charitable drops to a Catholic Diocese. They are invariably wonderful and generous people. They often look embarrassed in their Diplomatic Duds and wish that the honor might have been conferred upon 'someone more worthy' than themselves.

The Knights of Malta are also good in fiction - Knights of St. John/Templar/Malta or whatever. Dashiel Hammett's singularly hard-boiled novel The Maltese Falcon is part of a tradition going back to the Waverly Novels of Walter Scott -especially Ivanhoe. In Ivanhoe, the evil Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert and his pals the Knights Templar (Lucas de Beaumanoir, Reginald Front-de-Boeuf,Maurice De Bracy and Conrade de Montfichet Stout Normans all) make life a bed of nails for Saxons and Jews. In fact de Bois Guilbert wants to have his wicked way with Jewish English Princess Rebbecca -daughter of Issac Jew of York, who wants his daughter well quit of all the goyish boys including the Saxon Stud-muffin Ivanhoe, who has eyes only for the blond Stacked Saxon Simpleton Rowenna. I'd have taken a hard run at the exotic and raven haired Rebecca, myself - truth to tell.

Good novel stuff. Now, Seymour Hersh is going all blood libel on Catholics in his upcoming piece for the New Yorker. Sy is saying that the Knights of Malta have Assemblies of God members like former Gen. Stanley McCrystal doing the dirt on Muslims and American foreign policy via a secret control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.Get this!

. . .Don't they get it? We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get all the oil, nobody's gonna give a damn.'"

"That's the attitude," he continued. "We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command."

He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta."

Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Roman Catholic organization commited to "defence of the Faith and assistance to the poor and the suffering," according to its website.

"Many of them are members of Opus Dei," Hersh continued. "They do see what they're doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function."

"They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins," he continued. "They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.”"

Hersh relayed that he had recently spoken with "a man in the intelligence community... somebody in the joint special operations business" about the downfall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia. "He said, ‘Oh my God, he was such a good ally.'"

Next Week in The New Yorker! Knights Columbus Protect the Unborn and Support Special Needs Children by Selling Tootsie Rolls Manufactured by Jews ( estimable and generous Gordon Family*) in Chicago! Be Warned!

Gordon was born Ellen Rubin, the daughter of William B. and Cele H. Rubin. She attended Vassar College from 1948 to 1950. While at Vassar, she met and married Melvin J. Gordon, who would later become CEO of Tootsie Roll. The two were married on June 25, 1950 and had four daughters—Virginia, Karen, Wendy, and Lisa.

After her marriage, Ellen Gordon eventually returned to college. She attended Wellesley and received her B.A. in 1965 from Brandeis University. In 1968, Gordon did graduate work at the Graduate School of Arts and Science at Harvard University, which was the same year she started to work at Tootsie Roll.

Gordon has served as President and Board of Director Member of The Committee of 200 and as vice-president and board member of the National Confectioners Association. She has served as director and president of HDI Investment Corporation. She has also sat on the Harvard University Board of Overseers Visiting Committee for the university’s medical and dental schools. She has received a number of honors for her contributions and her work, including the Dean’s Award from the National Candy Wholesalers Association in 1978 and the Kettle Award from the candy industry in 1985.

When the Gordons are not in Chicago, the headquarters of Tootsie Roll Industries, they reside in Center Harbor, New Hampshire. The Gordons eventually hope to turn the business over to their four daughters and to the company’s senior managers.

Career DetailsEllen Gordon’s involvement with Tootsie Roll began in 1922 when the company went public and Gordon’s mother bought some shares of the company stock; she also encouraged all of her relatives to do the same. By the 1930s, she had a controlling interest in the company because of her stock holdings. In 1968 Ellen Gordon went to work for the candy company, starting in the areas of pension planning and product development. Two years later, she had moved into the position of corporate secretary. From there, her rise in the company was steady: vice-president of product development in 1974; senior vice-president in 1976, and president and chief operating officer in 1978.

By all accounts, Tootsie Roll is a sweet place to work . . . literally. Employees are encouraged to sample as many of the confections as they would like during the business day, and Gordon is known as a boss who takes a personal interest in her staff and employees. She greets everyone in the company by name.

Tootsie Roll was started in 1896 by an Austrian immigrant, Leo Hirshfield, who brought his secret candy recipe to the United States and began selling his hand-rolled chocolates for a penny a piece in a small store in New York. Hirshfield named his chocolate candies after his daughter, nicknamed Tootsie, who was five years old at the time.

By the early 1900s the candy was manufactured at a small candy factory. Its name was changed to Sweets Co. of America in 1917, and at that time, the company began to advertise its confection nationally. The company was registered on the New York Stock Exchange by 1922. The Tootsie Pop—a hard lollipop with a chewy Tootsie Roll center—was invented in 1931, and within seven years, the company had moved its operation to Hoboken, New Jersey and began mass production of the candy using conveyor belts.

As demand for the candy increased, the company opened a West Coast division, in Los Angeles in 1949. It wasn’t until 1966 that the company changed its name to Tootsie Roll Industries, Inc. At that time, the corporate headquarters were moved to Chicago, and a manufacturing plant was opened there, too.

When Gordon was named company president and CEO in 1968, she was one of the first women in the country to head a publicly-traded company. She would often get letters, she once said, addressed to Mr. Ellen Gordon or with the greeting, “Dear Mr. Gordon.” In 1993, Gordon proved her executive mettle when she won her company $1.4 million in state and local tax exemptions and other incentives, in exchange for keeping the business in Chicago.

Although Tootsie Roll was worth an estimated $245 million at the time, Gordon managed to obtain a lucrative incentive and benefits package for her more than 800 employees, capitalizing on the fact that the city had suffered a major economic blow the previous year. That move had cost the Windy City 2000 jobs, and officials were willing to negotiate with Gordon to avoid losing another substantial segment of the workforce.

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Dad always said that I couldn't find my butt with both hands. I can. Allow me to add this imperative -“Defend the unborn against abortion even if they persecute you, calumniate you, set traps for you, take you to court or kill you." - Pope Francis to celebrate Pro-life Mass, Vatican

About Me

A peach of a guy with all the sweetness one could expect from a life well-spent and in good company: short on brains but a terrific dancer!
Author:
Every Heart and Hand: A Leo High School Story
The Chorito Hog Leg, Book One: A Novel of Guam in Time of War